


Ghost Bell

by The_Jashinist



Category: League of Legends
Genre: Blessed isles, Children, Flashbacks, Gen, Headcanon, Pre-Ruination, Shadow Isles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-06
Updated: 2019-03-06
Packaged: 2019-11-13 01:02:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,935
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18021884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Jashinist/pseuds/The_Jashinist
Summary: Yorick remembers the child that would become Thresh, and is faced with what the Black Mist took before it even arrived.





	Ghost Bell

Yorick didn’t even notice the flower, but he certainly noticed the root that had suddenly sprouted to cover it.  Yorick stepped around the root and noted the flower, barely half its normal size and drooping like it was heavy with damp.  Its sheer blue-green petals were just transparent enough that the glowing white seed bulb in the center was visible.  A ghost bell, a sad, small, pathetic ghost bell the Black Mist would kill in a day.

Yorick continued on his way, keeping to the center of the path like he once had and checking the side to see if any other sea-colored blooms had resisted the death and dipped onto the path.

 _“Ghost bells are pretty,”_ he remembered one small voice saying, _“they’re like little glass cups with pearls inside.”_

Normally, Yorick would banish voices from his past, dismiss the words as idle things spoken by mortals who didn’t value their lives.  He didn’t dismiss this voice, not this one.  He let it roll in his head, an echo of a memory.  He clung to it as it faded.

It was all he had left.

* * *

 

It was sunny that day, unbearably sunny and hot.  The last spring typhoon had hit with a vengeance and Yorick dearly wished they hadn’t decided to put him on the plow in the boggy fields.  Who knows how they were going to grow taro and sweet potatoes in this kind of field.

A frog leapt out of the forest and landed in front of the plow.  Yorick was about to move to shoo it when he heard a chorus of shouts.  A young acolyte bounded over the fence in two steps and leapt at the frog.  He missed spectacularly, landing face first in the mud.

“Are you okay Auta?” one of the other acolytes asked as three more reached the fence.  The muddy boy got to his feet and wiped his face with a muddy, torn sleeve.  He couldn’t have been more than seven, a wild grin on his little brown-skinned face and his shoulder-length hair coiled into dark brown dreadlocks.

“This is a tricky one,” the boy reported to his friends.  As he turned back to them, he noticed Yorick.  Yorick, by now, was leaning patiently on the plow, waiting for the boys to go back to their frog hunt and pat down the field’s soil so it was easier to plow.

“Sorry Brother Yorick!” one of the boys shouted, too loudly as the boys around him flinched away.

“Liam,” Yorick identified the boy, who went beet-red, “Mathias, Kai,” Yorick turned to the mud-covered boy in front of the plow, “and Auta, _e taku mahuri_.”

Auta scowled at the nickname, “Just Auta.”

“I agree, a _mahuri_ isn’t nearly as loud,” Yorick answered.  The other three boys snickered.

“Liam’s louder,” Auta noted, “Did you see the frog?”

Yorick pointed to a few rows down, where the frog now sat, as if watching the conversation, or perhaps it just liked the muddy ground.

“Get it!” Liam tripped his way over the fence and spun Auta around like a top trying to catch the frog.  When Liam too ended up splayed out in the mud, Auta jumped on top of him with a loud whoop and the two set to tumbling about, the frog long forgotten, shouting and jeering as the other boys goaded them on.  It was innocent fun.  No doubt the mud felt a lot better than being sweaty while running around a jungle.  By the time all was certain and Auta had ended the fight by sitting cross-legged on Liam’s stomach, both were drenched in mud.

“Okay off,” Liam shoved Auta off of him and the boys stood.

“Sorry Brother Yorick,” Auta added, “we’re in your way.”

Yorick gave a slow nod, “So you are.”

The other boys ran off, but Auta remained, wringing out his clothes and hair.  He looked like he was thinking of something to say, or perhaps how to say it.  After a long silence, he opened his eyes and stood up straight.

“Is it true you can see ghosts?” he asked.

Yorick nodded slowly.

“Can you teach me how not to see them?”

Yorick furrowed his brow, “You—You can see them too?”

Auta nodded, “But they’re always really loud; I’d rather they be a little quieter, at least.”

“Have you tried asking them what’s wrong?” Yorick asked.

“Father Gray says I shouldn’t talk to them,” Auta replied.

“Well,” Yorick considered the question, “I’ve heard ghost bells quiet them, for a time.”

“Oh, I like ghost bells!” Auta chirped, “Ghost bells are pretty.  They’re like little glass cups with pearls inside.”

Yorick snorted at that assessment, “If you want to learn how to quiet them by talking to them, I can help you work on that, but try the ghost bells first.”

Auta nodded, “I will.  Thank you, Brother Yorick.”

* * *

 

Auta scowled staring at the withered rose with a sharp intensity.

“Don’t overdo it,” Yorick suggested, “you’ll make the flower decompose.  I’ve done that before.”

Auta screamed and threw the rose at the wall, where it splattered into brown mush.  Auta shook out his hand and pulled a face.

“It started melting,” Yorick guessed, “you overdid it.”

“This is pointless,” Auta stood, pacing circles around the hall, “oh and you said yourself I’ll be in trouble if the fathers see me doing this.”

“Necromancy _is_ forbidden,” Yorick granted, “but I’d rather you be able to control your magic, so we don’t have another incident.”

Auta sank into one hip, “That was hardly my fault.”

“You were the one that got angry,” Yorick pointed out.

“I didn’t know they buried someone under the abbot’s desk!”

Yorick snorted, probably the wrong thing to do as the frustrated Auta began pacing in circles once more, running his hands through his dreadlocks slowly.  Yorick liked to think Auta had grown tall, but of the acolytes, he was still quite short.  He was lean, lanky in all the ways a boy of thirteen summers would be.  He had a habit of sinking into one hip or the other and gods could attest to his temper.  It didn’t flare often but when it did, you could almost feel the sky darken and the ground shudder.

“Try again,” Yorick placed another withered flower on the ground, this one a ghost bell.  Auta looked down at the withered flower and took it gingerly in his hands.  The bulb had gone a dull gray and its little hood had wilted like a beached jellyfish.  Auta took a deep breath and looked down at it.  slowly, the flower sprang to life, its grayed bulb flaring up in a brilliant glow.  In delight, Auta grinned and looked up at Yorick, his green eyes glittering from the ghost bell’s glow.

Yorick nodded and Auta leapt up to hug Yorick tightly.

“Thank you so much!” he whispered.  Yorick almost felt his heart break, knowing that Auta couldn’t share his joy with anyone.  This was their secret.

* * *

 

“Brother Yorick.”

The voice was familiar, but the formality caught him off guard.  Yorick turned to the voice and was surprised by what he found.

“ _Brother_ Auta,” he nodded to the young monk, whose face split into a grin.  He looked over the brown and green robes he was wearing, with a leather brace around his midsection and his wrists wrapped with leather strips.  Everything was gilded gold and embroidered with star-maps signaling the rise of the Protector and the fall of the Warrior.  Yorick felt a surge of pride in his throat.  The trappings of a guardian, the only monks with leave to travel through the mist.

“What do you think?” Auta asked, “I mean I know it’s jarring but—a _guardian_.  Can you believe it?  Father Gray said I have the discipline for it.”

“A surprise from the boy who spent his childhood chasing frogs,” Yorick agreed.  Auta scoffed at that but was still smiling.  He turned towards the main citadel, then looked back to Yorick.

“I’ll be starting in the Vaults of Arcana,” he added, “discipline and strong will, so says Father Grigori.”

Yorick furrowed his brow, “I thought that was a hard assignment for even older monks.”

Auta shrugged, “I guess they think I can handle it.”  There was a pause, and Auta added, quietly, “Honestly when I got the robes, I thought I’d be collecting like Father Tyrus used to.  That’s why all the other acolytes want to be guardians.”

“The Vault is an honor,” Yorick reminded Auta.  Auta nodded, but his brow was furrowed.

“It feels like a shackle,” he replied.

“Brother Auta!” a call came from the citadel.  Auta looked up, then turned to Yorick.

“I’ll see you, Brother Yorick,” he promised, then ran off.  Yorick watched him leave, trying to keep the memory of his proud face in those robes.  He had a sinking feeling he’d never see that smile, that innocent pride, ever again.

* * *

 

The monastery door always creaked.  It wasn’t the fault of the sturdy wood, nor the rusted over hinges that Yorick worried would snap off one day.  No, the door simply creaked because it liked to, and no one had gotten the idea to stop it yet.  Yorick thought of the creak as a comfort, a regularity in the Black Mist’s agonizing chaos.  It was, like the monastery, a place where Yorick felt at home.

And he was not alone in that regard.

A bone glamor spiraled around the circular planetarium just beyond the monastery’s main hallway right where Yorick seldom ventured.  He didn’t like going there.  The glass dome over the room, once a shifting star map where one could observe the rising and falling of celestial bodies and constellations, was now ever clouded by rolling mists, sending a sickly green light into the room that bleached the stone ashen pale.  At the center of the room, on the star map that mimicked the dome, stood a spirit, its face turned up to the dome, but its eyes closed.

Yorick had, somewhere, lost the name of the human in favor of the meaning.  Whatever the spirit was called, they were now Thresh.  Yorick felt a pang of guilt in that regard, forgetting something like a name.  A lot of things lay forgotten between the two monks.  The quality of a smile, a laugh, a secret once fiercely kept, they stuck in Yorick’s mind as blurs, only vague emotions made the sight of the spirit a harsh reminder of what the Black Mist took.

“Brother,” Thresh greeted, not opening his eyes, barely shifting.

“Brother,” Yorick replied, “you don’t come this way often.”

“You’re never here when I do,” Thresh countered, finally opening his eyes and turning his gaze to Yorick, “either you have wandered somewhere, or your mind has.  Where does your mind wander, Brother?”

“The past is powerful,” Yorick reminded Thresh.

“But it fades,” Thresh finished the proverb sharply, “wounds heal, and scars grow pale.  It only festers if you cling to it.”

“How can you remember that but not the oath you took?” Yorick asked.

“ _I remember my oath_!” Thresh’s voice grew loud, swirling with the force of legions, “ _I also remember the chains that oath forced me to wear_!”  Thresh rushed forwards, his spectral form mere inches from Yorick, his voice went soft, “Do you think I am your failure Brother Yorick?”

Yorick couldn’t find the words to answer, but in the back of his mind, he couldn’t escape that question.

Because the answer to Thresh’s burning question was the one thing he dearly wanted to escape, more than even death.

The answer was yes.

**Author's Note:**

> Full disclosure I just really wanted to write child Thresh.


End file.
